Thursday, August 26, 2010

God is not to be tested

God’s veracity is not defended before the bar of human judgment.There can be no doubt but that the Judge of all the earth shall do right (Gen. 18:25).And so the servant of the Lord is required to “sacrifice his intellect” in the sense that he gives up his autonomous ways of thinking and submits to God’s word without wavering in unbelief (Gen. 22:1-19; cf. Rom. 4:20).When God commanded Abraham to sacrifice the son of promise, the only channel of fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, we do not see the father of the faithful challenging the rightness of God’s Word.Abraham did not sit down and work out an intellectual defense and explanation of God’s ways, and he did not stop to take it into his own critical ability to pass judgment as to whether this word could actually be from the Lord or not since it had all the appearance of contradicting the nature of God.No, Abraham did not bring God’s word into question.It was Abraham who was on trial, not God (Gen. 22:1); and he is rewarded for his faithful obedience to the Word of God (Gen. 22:18).Abraham bowed to the Word of God without doubting or proving it; he did not depend upon the authority of his own reasoning, but subordinated his thinking to God’s.All those who are genuine children of Abraham must do likewise.